Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace

MADE IN CHINA Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace

PUN NGAI

Duke University Press Durham and London 2005

Hong Kong University Press Hong Kong 2005

CONTENTS

}W.:kn()w[ledg:me!nts ix

;1/Sti!teME!;ets Capital: The Making and Unmaking of a New Chinese

the Village: Women's Struggles between Work and

the Art of Discipline and Resistance 77 :iRj.t'l\tl'ilrli>'

Dagongmei: Politics of Identities and Differences 109

and Transgression in the Workplace 165 a Minor Genre of Resistance 189

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

':

Stal."~i~~¥dfinishing

this book on Chinese women workers has taken me with many detours. In retrospect, the book would never har~'peI~accomplished if I had not received consistent support from so ma~~g~9ple; It is, first of all, a dedication to the Chinese dagongmei whose li~es~e~struggles moved me and helped to weave together each and every thr~a.d5.ofthisethnographic study. I am especially grateful to Yu Qin who assisr~gi1leillgaining access to the field site and in setting up the Shenzhen NanshanWomen Workers Center immediately after my fieldwork in 1996. Nee~I~Mt()say, it has been an immense challenge to create a home for the -wor~p~~~ughters and it would have been impossible without the generous help?f~edignified local people who deserve my greatest acknowledgment. ''"I'~i~'~ookevolved from my doctoral dissertation, and I am most indeb.tf~iito.Iny supervisors and colleagues in the School of Oriental and :Afri~~t~diesat the University of London. I would like to express my spec;f~b~r~titude to Elisabeth Croll, who provided me with invaluable intellect~fli~~ights and guidance. Her pioneering achievements in women stud~esip?9~i~aand her firm belief in solid ethnography inspired and directed met()Jhefield in China. I am also very grateful to Nancy Lindisfarne, who has~~5Il~coristant source of critical and reflective ideas and who shared map~gfll1yintellectual puzzles throughout the process of thinking and ;wrjting;] would also like to thank Mark Hobart, Kevin Latham, Jos Gamble, ona.l?n~j?Urney

x

Acknowledgments

Ku Hok-bun, Jens Franz, and the many others who provided stimulating discussions on the practices of anthropology and on postmodern challenges-my memory often draws me back to those days at the School of Oriental and African Studies. I must also thank Lau Kin Chi, Yip Hon Ming, Ng Chun Hung, Thomas Wong, Lee Ching Kwan, Choi Po King, Stephen Chiu, Lui Tak Lok, Law Wing Seng, Hui Po Keung, Luk Tak Chuen, Leung Hon Chu, and all of my teachers in Hong Kong who introduced me to gender, labor, and China studies when I was first thinking about which direction to pursue intellectually. Special thanks should be given to Wong Tak Hing and Fred Chiu, who gave me invaluable inspiration in formulating this study initially. This volume could not have been transformed into a book without the encouragement of Tani Barlow, who read the whole manuscript in its early stages. Valuable suggestions from two anonymous reviewers also helped to refine and sharpen my thinking throughout the revision process. Anita Chan and Jonathan Unger were the first to bring this ethnography to the public and have given me unlimited encouragement. Thanks also to Tan Shen and Shen Yuan for their help in introducing this study to a Chinese audience by publishing part of chapter 6 in Chinese. Special gratitude should be extended to Ann Anagnost, Li Zhang, Lisa Hoffman, Yan Hairong, Helen Siu, Bob Jessop, Sum Ngai Lin, and Chris Smith, who provided many insightful and critical comments in the later stages of revising the manuscript. I am deeply thankful to them. I am very grateful to Alvin So, Bian Yanjie, Ding Xueliang, David Zweig, James Kung, Lin Yimin, Agnes Ku, and many other colleagues at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology who inspired, read, and commented on chapters of this book and, most important, provided me with friendship and a warm intellectual learning community. Many thanks should also be given to Wong Siu Lun and Elizabeth Sinn, who at the University of Hong Kong Center of Asian Studies provided me with an amiable environment where I could continue my academic interests and studies. Over the years I have also received meticulous support, concern, and encouragement from many good friends in the course of writing this book. Many thanks to Eva Hung, Anita Chan, Lee Kim Ming, Ng Siang Ping, Ng Kin Wing, Chan Yu, Puk Wing-kin, Rebecca Lai, and Merina Fung. William Chiu, Yu Xiaomin, and Caren Wong's final support in editing and assisting with computer graphics helped to realize this book project. Many thanks should also be given to Ryan Conlon who devoted care and patience in helping me to polish my English.

Acknowledgments

xi

.i!?~e my greatest thanks to my mother and my two brothers, who have ~wayssupported

me in times of difficulty during the long process of re~earChand writing. Without their love, patience, and understanding, this bookwould not exist. •r:arlierversions of some of the chapters have been published elsewhere. garts?fchapters 4 and 5 appear in "Becoming Dagongmei: the Politics of Ide~~i~yand Difference in Reform China;' China Journal 42 (July 1999). S~ap:ter6 appears in "Opening a Minor Genre of Resistance in Reform c:hi~~:Scream, Dream, and Transgression in a Workplace;' positions 8.2 (fall 2oo(»).Parts of chapters 1 and 7 appear in "Global Capital, Local Gaze, and S()~iaITrauma in China;' Public Culture 14.2 (2002). I am grateful for permissiorito include these materials here.

INTRODUCTION

t·· .

\hdb~;ikRJWh~w I survived, but I am the onLy one who can be alive. All the women .... ,,::: ....... ':.: ..

\,/.-

.

;!JqrnirnyviLLagedied in the fire. I still can't believe that I'm Lucky enough to have

'~~~~~~dth~g~tesof hell.

~~,A'~4@i\idr()f~factory fire in China

y"

.

i~p.;iQ,~~yeIIlber 1993, a fire engulfed a factory in Shenzhen, China, run by a ;\ :"'t' •.:~";:~\:'::"""":',::.:/:'':'':' ..:.:.:': ' ....

.

~~?qf:~?,ngs~bcontractor to a European toy maker, a brand famous in both

i!t~.:.,~.~tuS0l'ean markets. The blaze killed over eighty workers, all but two r~{~erilfe~ale.Fifty others were seriously burned and another twenty were rW),~r~di1:;h~tragedy shocked Chinese society as well as the international ~~Wmm4~ity,asifit were the first trauma inflicted by global capital in reform-

I~~~\~~i#~itridas if the mass media had suddenly awakened to acknowledge itii~,~~~~fosts to rural migrant workers that had been paid as the price of ~~~pidecori6mic development. l However, the dream of mode~nity in Chinese ~r,x:"t/:.;.:>·:::-:.:::;··?i?/·::···::,::··:··:··::·>:". ':"",

~~p¢iety7'":iliegreat belief in capital and the market, especially after the illusory !iW~f~;;.::¥:t·~ .\:.)};'\»' ,";".: ;:".:': :', -:.:: .," . ~pio,~is~~ftheChinese state and the Communist Party-is permanently

~u!¥c;tjbe:dwit:hfactory fires, which burn with the hopes and desires, as well as

".j,,,:,.;,,\,;,::;,.,> ,'.,

!:m:~,~XiIsqfpqsts6cialist development, and in which the sacrifice of ordinary

~p:~,qp.l~~pcls~~altern classes are seen as a must for development. Chance had

1~t9?~~~m~~?!l1eet one of the factory's workers, Xiaoming, who of all the illWgr~nt~oIIienworkers from her village was the only one to survive the fire. ~~~?\

'.,

.:':">~>::::\"'::.::.:'.::"':':

2

Made in China

It was both the survivor, Xiaoming, and the blaze, which caused the collapse of the factory building but never dashed the dreams of the young Chinese dagongmei, the migrant working daughters that drove me to write this. volume. I am still not sure, however, whether it is those survivors who lived on with dreams and desires, or the fire and the deaths that most moved me toward the present book. In assembling this inescapable social violence on women's lives, I started the long journey in search of a Chinese worker-subject within the trajectory of China's state socialist system's incorporation into global capitalism. I also wanted to articulate a possible minor genre of social resistance in contemporary China, a country that is rapidly transforming itself into a "world factory" for global production by providing to investors a great quantity of cheap labor and natural resources. Fire, pain, and memory flash across Xiaoming's life story, highlighting an epochal trauma and the social resistance that runs through the lives of dagongmei in this time of restructuring Chinese society. More than ten years have passed since the blaze. Xiaoming's life still shimmers in my mind, offering both shadow and light as I try to glimpse the birth and struggle of a new social body-the dagongmei in a rapidly globalizing China. I met Xiaoming in a hospital. Her body was completely burned-all of her skin was seared and charred-but left behind was a pretty face with glinting, innocent eyes. She looked weak but very calm. During my visits, she told me about herself and her life in her village at home: Kids liked to fight, to jump, to sing. But I liked to dance, so I figured I could be a dancer someday.... It's not easy to get to my village. It's in a mountainous area that no train or bus can reach. You have to walk about an hour to reach my home.... I have no idea of how to go back home now.... People there are poor, but very simple ... there is almost no trust in city. I don't like city people. For a couple of years, I helped my parents by doing farm work and housework. Young people nowadays no longer like tilling the fields. I didn't either. Everybody said working "on the outside" was fun and I could earn lot more money that way. In 1990, I left with some fellow villagers and took a job in a garmeIlt plant in Shenzhen. That was my first time looking for a job. I was very scared when I was given an interview and tested by the management. Many people competed for jobs in the factory, and I felt I was alone fighting for it.

the

a

Introduction

3

Itold myself to be grown-up, as I had to take care of myself with or Without fellow villagers in the same plant. I was placed in a tiny bunk in the factory dorm and I knew nobody. At that time, I understood the often-said ziWei (feeling) ofleaving home that means you have nobody to depend on btit'YOurself. Butgetting out for the first time was still exciting-the big city, the skYscrapers, the shops, and so many people .... It was like watching a film, and... I was there. Everything was interesting to me, and I found myself to be verYrustic and innocent.... Btlt I wasn't happy with my first job. The factory, which was owned by a Taiwariese boss, often put off paying our wages. We were supposed to get paid em the first day of each month, but they were often late, sometimes a niol1th,sOmetimes two months .... At least the pay wasn't lower than in thebthei factories. I could make about 300 yuan [US$38] each month . . ····I1eft the factory in May 1991 and was introduced by my cousin to the toy c~n,pany. It was a big plant.... We worked very hard, from sunrise to rriidnight, twelve hours a day. Every day I would be worn out, all my energy gone... ; But I felt happy there. I had dozens of relatives and friends; we chatted alot and helped each other. Frorri that point on, I never thought of working in another factory.... three months could send about 600 yuan back to my hometown to myJatheras well as keep a few hundred for myself. I thought I could work thereforat least another few years. Bufthen the fire happened, the fire. 2

Every

I

nc::verexpected to meet Xiaoming, a twenty-one-year-old migrant :~K:freshfrom a village in Hubei, a relatively poor region of China. uSrl~~s worried that recalling memories of the fire would be too :ul~for~er, we chatted about her childhood, her family, and her work dence inShenzhen. Many years later, after I had returned to the field l1~henzhen, I still could not forget Xiaoming's face and voice: IWass3tisfied with my job in the toy plant. It was terribly hard work, but *eh~dfuri too. . We hada plan. Before we went back home for marriage. we were going tosa~emoney to go to Beijing. It was such a big dream.

4

Made in China

Social traumas such as factory fires adumbrate social violence in general, as well as the specific triple oppressions of the Chinese dagongmei by global capitalism, state socialism, and familial patriarchy that work hand in hand to produce particular labor exploitations along lines of class, gender, and··· rural-urban disparity. These triple oppressions-political, economic, and . . sociocultural-reinforce one another as.they present new configurations specific to Chinese society at the opening of the socialist system to global···· production. While these oppressions are still attached to their own cultural and social conditions, they are rapidly shifting and being remade, eagerly looking for new matrices of power and practices to regulate society. The repositioning of China as a "world factory" in the new international division··· of labor is without doubt a project of global capital, which provides the bedrock for nurturing a new Chinese working class in general, and a new·· worker-subject, the Chinese dagongmei, in particular (Lee 1995, 1998; Jacka 1998; Pun 1999; Xu 2000). Cheap labor and low prices for land are not the only reasons for the current relocation of transnational capital to China. Diligent, well-educated Chinese women workers who are willing to toil for twelve hours each day, who are suitable for just-in-time global production, and who are potential consumers for global products are all factors that contribute to tempting transnational capital to relocate to China (Croll 1995; Davis 2000; Chen et a1. 2001; Pun 2003; Yan 2003). The lives of Chinese dagongmei have to be understood against this larger development, which consists of two reactionary forces in China. The first. force is comprised of the changing modes of social regulation and political·.·. engineering of society by the party-state, and the second is the increasing capitalization or. marketization of socialist society, embroidered with the· hegemonic eulogy of the "search for modernity" or "quest for globality" and branded with the slogan yu quanqiu jiegui ("setting China on the track of globalization"). At one time the central component in understanding Chi~ •. nese society was the party-state planning nexus. Now it is the party-state market complex-with its enlarged power blocs and blurred boundaries among political and business elites-that drives ongoing conflicts and ten~ sions in Chinese society, inevitably generating new social forces and social resistances. The rapid changes in China in the past two decades-the open~ ing of the country to global capital and the introduction of market mecha" nisms to rescue the declining legitimacy of the party-state, and thus the contractual engineering of society by both market and state-inflict double wounds and triple oppressions on Chinese society. The hybrid marriage Of state power and global capital generates new forms of control on both the

Introduction

5

societaLand individual levels. This time, land and labor, nature and human life,ilieallmarketed as commodities for sale, not merely by the "capitalist" mar¥et~~t by the "socialist" party-state. However, the decentering of central powerllndthe weakening of the ideological apparatus are far from represellting3:"retreat of the state" in regulating social life in reform China (Shue 1988).~ather, the worn-out yet still-existing hukou system (the population 'registrysystem); the parochial nature of urban governments with expanding administrative power; the strict control of the population ahd economic devel6pment;and repressive measures against independent labor organizationsalldictate a specific process of proletarianization and struggle in con:tempoi~r}'China. Tra.~sience

is the dominant characteristic of the lives of Chinese dagongthe urban factories is often short term-four to five years onaveraFe:This transient working life is not the choice of the women ;migrantworkers but rather is a consequence of the legacy of socialist control and the residue of the Chinese patriarchal family. Structurally bound by the state,tlt~hukou registry system ties the fate of the dagongmei to their rural plate 9t~irth. Thus Chinese migrant workers, often called mingong (peasant ;w:orker~)'i~re deprived of the basic right to stay in the cities, to establish familiespandto enjoy proper education, medical care, and other social :welfare~!st~ms to which urban residents are entitled. 3 This results in the ,Wi,despreadutilization of dormitory labor in the industrial or developing ,zonesiriChinese urban areas, by which both foreign and local enterprises inaxil11,iz~'\VOrking time and extract labor power without worrying about :the repI'Cldllction oflabor in the long run. Hence the temporary use of ChineseJ~~?l"isinstitutionally legitimated by the Chinese state, whose hukou system;~beitchanging, provides population and labor control that favors global and private capital. The exploitative features of the system are further inscribed with local s()ciala~~cultural configurations that perpetuate the temporary use of ·Jabodriglobal workplaces in Shenzhen as well as in other economic de/velopm.ent:iones, The Chinese patriarchal family, although 'rapidly changing iri,the}7foI'Ihperiod,4 still seriously constrains the life course of Chinese ruralw9rnen;especially in terms of education, household division of labor, :;wage la§?r,and the timing of marriage. The majority of the women migrant 'Woikets,p~()most often are young and single, still have to struggle to make ;,theiro~~edsions about wage work and marriage. A woman's mid- to late ?tWenties}stypically the point at which the family decides whether to allow a \woman to work in the urban areas (Pun 2000). Beyond this age the delay in mei.Ih~irstay in

6 Made in China

"marrying out" will be considered too high a cost to pay. Short-term wage work thus is expected in the premarital life cycle for most village girls. Quitting work for marriage and then returning to village life is still the shared feature of most migrant working daughters, although this common fate is not without resistance. The golden period of youth, between the ageS of eighteen and twenty-five, is thus subsumed by the expropriation of global capitalism and the state socialist system, which is continuously in favor of urban and industrial development. Taking a path different from Western proletarianization, the Chinese migrant workers did not launch open confrontations with capitalist man~ agement, nor were they able to become a significant political force, because any formal attempt to organize or form an independent trade union would have been vigorously suppressed by the Chinese government (Chan 2001; Lau 2001). However, although the formation of an organized working-class force was curtailed, if opportunities emerged the migrant workers did not hesitate to initiate short-lived, spontaneous strikes and collective actions that were generally unrecorded. Transience and liminality as the dominant characteristics of migrant working life also raised barriers to nurturing over time a collective class force in the cities. However, in a situation in which confrontational collective actions were severely contained and politi:' cally suppressed, a motley collection of transgressive actions, ranging from common workplace defiance to everyday tactics of resistance, sprouted and spread (see Liu 1996; Lee 1998b; Blecher 2002; Perry 2002). Individual migrant workers like Xiaoming, the survivor of the fire, seemed to understand well their situation. Xiaoming knew that she would encounter the same impasse as other working daughters: a choice between a single life as a worker in the city and married life in the village. Neverthe~ less, she and her friends had other thoughts. They knew that after marriage they would be forced to stay in the village of their husband for the rest of their lives probably without another chance to work in the city.s Therefore; around the time of the 1992 New Year holiday, their wish became a plan: save money for a tour of Beijing, the capital, before they were married out. The everyday tactics of dagongmei, always lively, situational, and collective, corri~ posed a new symphony of migrant workers' transgression in contemporary China (Certeau 1984; Scott 1990). And thus Xiaoming began to save money for herself. By late autumn 1993,· after sending money to her family, she had 500 yuan. One chilly day, however, the fire burned the money and the dream.

Introduction :.

7

...;.: .. : ....

'SciCialActor or (lass Subject? Xiaoming'spassage to becoming a dagongmei coincided with the social transfotillation that began in the early 1980s, as the state socialist regime of (:onterl1p()raryChina launched the shift from a rigid planned economy to a marketecoriol11Y. The quest for modernity (or "globality:' to use the new l;mguage) in China's postsocialist period opened Chinese society to private ,;mdglobalcapital and allowed the capitalist apparatus and relations to ;regulateriot only economic life but also social and cultural life. The first ~road issue that runs through this book is that of the change in individual livesin>~>e>Wake ofChina's search for modernity and globality in the reform period.,]nasociety in transition, what does the hybrid mixture of state ~ociaIistandcapitalist relations ask individual bodies to live up to? What sort '()f new> subjects, new identities, and new relationships of power and re>~i,stanceeII1erge?

;:;, In Critique to Modernity, Alain Touraine remarks: "We are all embarked sW,ltheadventure of modernity; the question is whether we are galley slaves :~r passepgers with luggage who travel in hope, as well as being aware of the pJ;'eakswewill have to make" (1995, 201). Alain Touraine highlights the iparadoxMthe hegemonic project of globality by arguing that "the contemP9caryworldaccepts modernity by an overwhelming majority"; "almost all ppc:ietieshavebeen penetrated by new forms of production, consumption andcoirlIll.llnication"; and in some cases, "even when leaders denounce their Fountrf'~penetration by the market economy, the people welcome it;' espe,fially 3.lll0ng the poor or unemployed workers (1995,201-202). An eagerness '1'0 articulate a modern imagination is demonstrated as much by the Chinese ~~ateasbytheChinese migrant workers. This process of globalizing moderpity is bynomeans a simple process of universalizing new forms of producJion,c()nsurnption, and communication, and no doubt it requires more ~,ophist:l2atedstudies that should seriously take into consideration the force 9fimiversalization on the one hand and of disjunction and cultural differ,~nc:esontheother (Appadurai 1996). Theorizing these tWo forces not as ~ppositionalbut as multilayered, criss-crossing, and overlapping, someWnes cooperating, sometimes confrontational, and sometimes retreating, is 'l1lorehelpfuljn trying to disentangle the competing forces in this process of glpbaIizipg China. And if "modernity at large" is a project too big for any ~sJngle national or individual imagination to contain, then the argument for ;m,,"aIternativeversion of Chinese modernity" based on a conventional

8

Made in China

nation -state or a political agenda of the state as a unit of analysis is also very problematic (Ong and Nonini 1997; RofelI999). Becoming dagongmei, a journey of subject making in this project of modernity at large (Appadurai 1996), conjures up a new dialogic space where the force of universalism and the force of historical specificity and cultural difference can meet and collude in new configurations. The geneaF ogy of the new subject, the dagongmei, derives insights from Foucault's "techniques of the self;' in which he clearly argues for attending to "the procedures, which no doubt exist in every single society, suggested or pre; scribed to individuals in order to determine their identity, maintain it, oJ: transform it in terms of a certain number of ends, through relations of selfmastery or self-knowledge" (1997, 87). Foucault suggests a kind of project that can articulate the intersection of two themes: a history of subjectivity and an analysis of forms of "govern mentality" (87-88). On the issue of subjectivity, we have to ask how the subject was established at different: moments and in different institutional contexts as a possible, desirable, or even indispensable object of knowledge (87). For the analysis of governmentality, what is at stake is not only performing the necessary critique of common conceptions of "power:' or analyzing these as a domain of strategic: relations focusing on the behavior of the other(s), but also as "the govern.. ment of the self by oneself in its articulation with relations with others" (88); Nevertheless, Foucault's genealogical projects on the technologies of the self are inclined to highlight the detailed techniques of individualizing the sub~ ject, which somehow overshadow what he has argued concerning the "artic~ ulation of relations with others." If individuation is indeed the central "tech; nique" of making a modern self, as many would like us to believe, it is high time to review this process not in dichotomized Western or Eastern contexts but rather so as to show how this process of subjectivization involves ll. project of both atomized individuation and relational subject making. I do not intend here to suggest that the Chinese subject is more relational and therefore that the Western-oriented model of the individualized selfis irrelevent to understanding Chine~e modernity and its subject. On the issll¥ of constituting the modern Chinese self as part of the project of modernity in general, and of turning Chinese rural migrant bodies into industrial workers in particular, there is always a complex dual process: an intensity of market forces geared toward an increasing atomization of Chinese individf uallives, and a recurrence of social forces entangled in the meshes of guanxi (social network), tongxiang (native-place relationship), kinship, family, geIl.~ der, age, marital status, and so on (Honig 1986; Hershatter 1986; Perry 1993;

Introduction

9

Yang 1994). When Xiaoming was placed on the production line in the garmentplant, facing multiple examinations and controls by management, she wasrioidoubt displaced-separated from her family and tongxiang, who were alsO striving for jobs, and alone in facing the imperative of capital, whOse techniques were oriented to individuation. The process of entering theJactoryat the beginning was a process of individuating the self, letting theinrlividual realize that it had recourse to nobody but itself. This struggle wasasodal one, a struggle to become dagongmei, but its passage was that of a Ion~r,)Gaoming highlighted that learning to be grown-up was to take care of herself with or without fellow villagers in the workplace. Indeed, aloneness was an overwhelming theme repeatedly articulated by the dagongmei in their diaries, letters, and various genres of literature. While individuating the subject is a project of capital, practicing forms of collectivity embedded in social relations or enacted from cultural resources are- also persistent "everyday tactics" of women working against market forces, both· in early modern China and in the contemporary period. In earlY4wentieth-century China the formation of tongxiang enclaves in the Shanghai or Tianjin workplaces was an important means of generating social identities (albeit fragmented, fluid, and changing), and thus overt or coveitsodal actions (Honig 1986; Hershatter 1986; Perry 1993).6 In contem,porarY9~ina:, women in the foreign-owned workplaces and elsewhere are .still very much encircled by tongxiang and kin networks that, although !reimaginedand reconstructed, often provide the most intimate and trustftilsupports. The distinctions between Cantonese, Chaozhou, and Hakka workers, or. the outside workers of provinces like Sichuan, Hunan, or Hubei, .still mattered most among the women workers themselves (Tam 1992; Lee J998a;rIlI11999). The articulation of tongxiang identity is very much a 'projectOf cultural performance used by Chinese migrant workers as a coun-;~rtacticiothe individuation project of capital in the process of Chinese :,proletadanization. The process of subjectivization-the making of dagongVwei;.....th~sinvolves the multiple elements of atomized individuation and ;tettain}orms of collectivity specific to Chinese society. .~.1iEmbedded in specific familial relations, the lives of dagongmei in the \~eform.)perioclremain very much constrained while also supported by the l?:~pidly changing Chinese patriarchal family. These patriarchal relations, as ii$ta'cey (i983),Andors (1983), and Wolf (1985) have argued, were never un;4ermined.bythe socialist revolution in China. The patriarchal family was iwaintained throughout Mao's period by patrilocal marriage practices and tth:~iUnequalsexlial division of labor in the realm of work and household.

10

Made in China

The post-Mao family, especially in rural areas, repeated and reenacted patriarchal relations by openly discriminating against female babies as the inferior sex and by continuing to pressure daughters to marry out in their mid-twenties (Davis and Harrell 1993; Croll 1995). For Chinese women, their fates as daughters and wives of men were extensively renegotiated, and although little collective resistance to the Chinese patriarchal family was recorded (Sheridan and Salaff 1984; Judd 1994), painful individual acts challenging family decisions about work and marriage were numerous in the workplace. Touching stories of escape, either from a father's or a husband's home, to work in the factory were often shared among the women workers? Vacillating between industrial work and rural family, most of the dagongmei nevertheless opted for the former and dreamed of staying in the city as long as possible. However, when conflicts between these two realms were not overt, family and kin supports were still the last resort for the Chinese rural migrant workers who had nowhere to turn when problems or diffi~ culties arose in their urban industrial work. Nevertheless, these familial relations and their cultural practices provisionally helped to keep the indi~ viduation process of capital in check and espoused a cultural difference in the process of subjectivization and modernity in China. In addition to drawing on Foucault's insights on techniques of self, the Marxian analysis of class struggle, and women's studies of gender and labor, I turn to the work of Alain Touraine and his concept of "social actors" as! embark on this dagongmei project. Dagongmei like Xiaoming, working in foreign-invested factories, are pioneers in experiencing the deep and rapid social transformation of Chinese society-the change from an agricultural and state socialist mode of production to an industrial and capitalist mode of production. As women, as peasants, and as migrant workers, dagongmei are liminal subjects living in a shifting society. They can never be easily CO" opted by any dominant language, whether intellectually or politically. As Ann Anagnost (1997, 17-44) puts it succinctly, "making the subaltern speak" as a revolutionary project in Chinese literary realism in the early twentieth century was paradoxically subsumed into a party-state parlance making USe of an alienated category of !\1arxist class analysis. While the category of cla.ss no longer seems alien in reformed China, the making of the new worker~ subject is still far more complicated than a conventional, or worse reified, Marxist notion of "class" can discern. Maoism, in contrast, placed great emphasis on human agency and cre~ ativity and thus was antithetical to the orthodox Marxist analysis of class and society. The notion of class was no doubt alien to the Chinese peasantry who

Introduction

11

forllledthe base of the Chinese Communist revolution, and yet the Communist Party persistently proclaimed itself the vanguard of the Chinese proletariat; The arbitrary relationships between political symbolism and i;lass~l.l~jects were too conspicuous, making the Chinese Communist revolutioIll60klike a postmodern project long before postmodernism came into play in the field of social analysis. There was too great a gap between the signifi~daridthe signifier, and the discrepancy sustained and yet at the same ~e~c::feated the language of "class" as a meaningful signification, while the langriagepersistently and seriously affected the configuration of the Chinese subject status.· It is no wonder that the political signification of socialist ,China~equired mass mobilization from time to time to cover up this discrepanCY.The Chinese subject in terms of class identity thus was not understood asadistortion, but the interpellation of subject positions demanded a :force if allything greater than the economic or material. The dialectics of ,class relations, Mao believed, required a cultural revolution. ~(iTheformation of the new social body, Chinese dagongmei, with all of '~eirstruggles-rich, heterogeneous, and muitisited-can no longer be de:~cribed otp()liticized as mere class struggles as the subjects experience, make ;~ense, react, and project their life trajectories in contemporary China. It 'iioes I'i?t mean that class analysis is simply outdated as the language of class i.s now dUu.tedby the hegemonic discourses of state and capital in the search ,()ra globalChina. Indeed, it is not that simple. Restructuring class struc~ures an~relationships is a contemporary project for capital and the newly i~Inerge~.elites in Chinese society. And yet the subsumption of class analysis ;irtordertohide class positions and social privileges is their political strategy. \'!'he languag~of class is subsumed so as to clear the way for a neoliberal ;'~tonomiccliscourse that emphasizes individualism, professionalism, equal ;:~>I')portHnities,and the open market. Thus the history of class in China is 'iIoublydisplaced, first by the Chinese state-party and second by the market. )~hedoubledisplacement of class is very political in the sense that it helps to ifrlmcatethesignification of class experience in rapidly shifting con tempo~,arr Chillese society. ';F",As~",e~pon of social struggle class analysis, if useful, can only be reacti.ya~ed b)'rooting it in class experience from below-that is, in the everyday 'in:frapoliti of the Chinese workers themselves in confrontation with capital ;lri1d theil:tarket.8 Chinese dagongmei, caught in the impasse of triple oppres;~ioris,h~veto live out their own class experience as part of their life struggles. ;~dif the Chinese subject has been traumatically interpellated by an alien J~guage o(class from above, then dagongmei, as one of the new subjects to

cs

12

Made in China

emerge at the intersection of global capitalism and the Chinese modernity project, invokes a desire for a return to class analysis, which paradoxically became a dead language because of its hegemonic nature. I take care here to note that it was not class analysis as such that grafted onto the Chinese subject the effects of a hegemonic discourse, but instead the very nature ()f its political arbitrariness from above. If class analysis is already a dead language in today's China, the rearticulation of the new subjectivity, which I will describe below as dagong, in postsocialist China is nevertheless a timely project.

Becoming the Oagong Subject

Dagong denotes a process of turning individuals into working subjects, particularly for a capitalist "boss." The term mei further registers the working subjects with a gendered identity in a specific context. Imported froII1 the Cantonese in Hong Kong, where labor relations are mainly regulated by the market, dagong simply means "working for the boss;' a term that power~ fully connotes the commodification of labor, or the exchange of labor for a wage (Lee 1998a). The terms dagongmei (working girls) and dagongzai (working boys), used extensively over the past two decades, contrast with the term gongren, the proletariat, a far more popular usage in Mao's period, and one that denoted a highly privileged class status in Chinese society that was out of the reach of the Chinese peasantry. The state propaganda stated that gongren, the proletariat class, were the masters of the country; they were not the alienated.Iabor that Marx said existed in capitalist societies. The gongreri as an ideal type was a new kind of subject produced by the Chinese socialist state to liberate labor from alienation and to fully actualize itself in the process of production. In reality, in the past three decades of state socialist experience the Chinese gongren worked virtually for the state, with the state as a "socialist boss" providing not only wages but permanent employmerit, housing, medical care, and education for the younger generation (Walder 1986). It was nevertheless a special type of state socialist labor relations that struggled to change capitalist labor relations. Dagong means not just a departure from the socialist boss but also the coming of new bosses from global capitalist societies. No longer under the protection of the state, dagong also refers to casual labor-labor that can be dismissed at will, that can be replaced by anyone who is willing to sell his or her labor for a lower price. The value of dagong, if any, is determined by market forces and its surplus value is extracted as a component of capitaliSt

Introduction

13

protl.t.tnother words, the term dagong signifies the change to capitalist labOl:telations and the dagongzai/mei is a new configuration imbued with anawai"eneSs oflabor exploitation and class consciousness. "HClW'ca.rithis new dagong subject develop its subjectivities and identities Ul away that can be completely differentiated from its previous class subJ!!ii·-·the gongten of the state socialist period? And how can the making of t}l1sne~911inese worker-subject derive dynamics and «life tactics" from below that cannot readily be subsumed into any single political agenda? :Flirther,whatmodalities of transgression, individually or collectively, can be 'form~latedwithout anchoring them in any «teleological vision" of proletariaIlizationU'hese are the primary questions that form the core of this book. ,':; ;Std'p~.e:~of any essentialized connotation of class, dagongmei is a specific iWorkercsubject not only embodied with production relations but also social '¥id c:ulturaldiscourses, consumption relations, social networks, familial :~elatio~s'i~ender tropes, and social resistances. If the class subject is a project ()fo~eriI1g,with an inclination to externalize onto others an abstraction ,that teridersaccess to political maneuvers, then the dagong subject is a ',~~retumt() th.eactor" who, as Alain Touraine argues, is "a call to transform ,the seifilltoa social actor" (1995,207), and as such strives to resist both state pdwera#,d/market forces. 9 It is a return to individual experience and the .ie3J.izati6ri

..

,

r~f~lTh~~rol\rdstood fast at the factory gate. Three uniformed guards, tall and

:~~9ngieachholding an electric baton and standing beside the gate, tried to MzY,~~!

.: . . . -:-:eafn ten times more than in the village!" She spoke with a selfI~Qnfidentt()ne. "Was your husband angry with you?" I was getting more and ~J,iioreinterested in her story. "Oh, he lost his temper whenever I mentioned j~oing()littodagong.... We argued over the issue several times. I com\~lainedthatI had married a useless man and into a poor family. [She !~)~ughs;lltold my husband I had depended on his family for twenty years ~hd nbw""as high time that I supported myself. I wanted to contribute my !~ha:re. I wanted to dagong and earn money for the family:' ~W;:i.Chun.m~rriedinto her husband's village in the late 1970S at the time !:¢~&nomic.reform started in rural China. After her marriage, the production~e.1lIl1 systel'l1was disbanded and the land was distributed back to households

m

0:;"

:':.'

....... : : ",

70

Made in China

by the rural household responsibility system. As Chun recalled, the 19805 were the golden years of village life. Rural families got rich at a time when the state was still willing to buy their grain at a good price (Oi 1989).10 Int~e 1990S, however, rural life stagnated and underemployment and unemployment became serious problems in rural areas. Out-migration then became a trend in Chun's village, and young women enthusiastically moved out oithe village to explore a new life in the cities. Chun, like other married women, was bound by her marriage; she ga"e birth to her son one year after marrying. Then her daughter came three years later, and for the years following she was completely tied down by family responsibilities. She had no opportunity to leave the village, butshe did observe most of the young women moving in and out. She never enjoyed freedom, and she never earned money for herself and her family. In a retrospective mood, she stated: "I told myself to wait until my children grew up. I waited for more than fifteen years. One day, I made a decision to go out to dagong in Guangdong. I knew it was already late at my age, and ifI didn't make it I'd have no chance anymore in my life. I left my son's father in silence with a letter." Chun told her husband that she would return home at Spring Festival time and bring back money for the family. "I was so happy and frightened,it was the first time I had left the village:' She then made her trip to Guangdong, and with the introduction of a fellow villager she finally got a job~t the Meteor factory. Chun emphasized that as a married woman shewa5 lucky to find a job: "You know, jobs here are all for young, single girls. Old women like me could hardly be given an offer. I was quite satisfied to workas a cleaner. Low status, but who cares? 1 can still earn five hundred each month, which is half a year's work in the village." At the time of our talk, Chun was struggling with whether or not to go back home. She had been working at Meteor for two years, and she missed her children, if not her husband, too much to continue her work in the factory. With a smile of selfesteem she told me: "I've saved a few thousand yuan in these two years; arid now I can repay the family debt. I would also like to buy some new clothes for my son, daughter, and the children's father." Chun's story articulates how a middle-aged Chinese married woman struggled to live for herself and not be tied to patriarchal family life in the village. By escaping to dagong in the city without her husband's permission, she openly challenged the patriarchal relations and gender imbalance at a time of rapidly changing family life in reform China. However, resistance and domination in family life is never a simple dichotomy in the lives Of

Marching from the Village

71

:woIl1enhirural China. When we look deep into Chun's struggles, in addition.t(lgaining independence and empowerment her dream was to repay the fam~y'~debt and contribute to the family's finances. As a married woman, ~er~r~desire from going out to work was to buy her husband and children ,n~wfl~thes for the Chinese New Year festival. Her desire ofleaving home to !;4agong/could be another alienation of her presumed attachment to her cfamily,which provided the original placement for her identity. These in:tricat~li?ks between defiance and domination suggest a need to look at WOIl1eIJ.'sstruggles and the dagong's desire within broader societal dynamics 'and as part of the structural factors of China's transformation . •->,\"

:fxperi~JC:ingAntagOniSm

~>,::'

,

bong~dChun's struggles illustrate the fact that they were not just fighting

!;gamstthe.patriarchal family but also against an undesirable village life. A .'ijeepiliral"'urban divide existed in China and nurtured the soil for rural ;",om#n'sstruggles between work and family and for rural-urban migration )for theydonger generation to live out their desires in the urban areas. There ;~ereatleast two seductions-effectively a coin with nvo sides-for this ;§tron~dagong desire: one was the women's struggles between work and Jamily;theother was the great disparity between the city and countryside, ,'~nd betyeenthe working class and the peasantry. ;. Irltllefollowing quote Marx expresses his view of the urban-rural divide: S~~Thea#tagonism of town and country can only exist as a result of private :iprop~fV.It is the most crass expression of the individual under the division 'qfla1.19r~under a definite activity forced upon him-a subjection which 'lnakesoneman into a restricted town-animal, the other into a restricted (c:oun~t-animal, and daily creates anew the conflict between their interests" i(MatlC.ahdEngels 1976, 72). Here, however, Marx is wrong in saying that the f~tag()hisin of town and country could only exist in a society of private tprope~tY.Chinese state socialism in the 1950S witnessed the confiscation of 'privatF,property while at the same time a huge urban and' rural chasm ,'withihChinese society was created. Indeed it was neither feudalism nor the i'petty-:~pitalism of past Chinese history that turned human beings into ;·prohil.1ited town or country animals but rather the socialist development (;(lictatedby the Chinese Communist Party that claimed to liberate all couni.,trym~rfroin oppression. It is surely not fair to say that the Chinese state ,'$pecinc~l1yaimed at creating hierarchies among the people, especially the :;deepidiVidebetween the working class and the peasantry. However, it is

72

Made in China

correct to say that it was the by-product of the developmentalism and stat~ ism inherent in Chinese socialism (Seldon 1993; White 1993). In modern China, social and class divisions were not produced by the capitalistnia~ chine, based on market logic-that is, the "inequality but justice" ofthe distribution of private property among individuals through the exchange mechanism. Rather, divisions and hierarchies were created by a party-state that confiscated private property and turned it into "state property:'a~d then arranged, distributed, and sanctioned different sectors of peopleac~ cording to the logic of its planned economy. My concern in this chapter has been to understand the women's desire for dagong and women's struggles between work and family within a larger social dynamic, by which the present desire of a mobile society ste~rTd toward industrial capitalism by a "socialist" state and a mainly agrarian population. The existing social divisions that the state hoped to narrow by a hybrid "socialist market economy" were actually enlarged, especially between the city and the countryside and between the eastern coastal a:reas and the western interior. The great desire of labor flows, from the rurano the urban, from the west to the east, only signified the attempt from the bottom to challenge this seemingly unbridgeable social divide created fr6m above. The possibility of closing this social divide faded as the economic reforms continued. Indeed, as Wang Shaoguang (2000) has noted, the economic reforms turned from a win-win game to a zero-sum game in 1993 when Chinese reform entered the second phase, which was characterized by grow-· ing social ine.quality and worsening unemployment. Rural per capitCl.income grew at an average annual rate of fifteen percent in real terms from 1978 to 1984, but then economic growth in terms of agricultural productivity. and rural income stagnated in the second half of the 1980s and early 19#os; The gap between urban and rural income was further widened whenrl.lral: income per capita increased less than 3 percent from 1985 to 1990 (vydrld Bank 1992,57-58). Unequal development, far more serious in reform C~iI1a; further deepened the social lack, although opportunities given to ther~faL population to get rich seemed greater. Social polarization nevertheless be". came deeper and deeper from the mid-1990S onward. Wang states: "By1999,\ the urban-rural divide was as deep as it had been in 1978. All the gairtsof earlier years had been lost .... While a typical urban resident earnedahout 200 Yuan more than his rural counterpart in 1978, by 1997, the difference) amounted to more than 3000 Yuan. . . . Compared to other couI1.tries,~ China's rural-urban gap is unusually large. In other countries, theI'atio(

Marching from the Village

73

of urban to rural incomes is normally below 1.5 and rarely exceeds 2.0, but in China, real urban incomes are as much as four times real rural incoI:l1es, if urban residents' welfare benefits of various kinds are to be inciuded(20oo, 386-88):' .... .'. China. thus became one of the most unequal countries in terms of ruralilrbaIldisparity in its region of the world and among developing countries more generally in the 1980s and 1990S (Riskin, Zhao, and Li 2001, 3). The GinLcoefficient of inequality in household income rose seven percentage points (18 percent) between 1988 and 1995, with a high inequality of rural households per capita income reaching an estimated 23 percent and urban inequality 42 percent over the same period. In terms of regional disparity, jheWotidBank (1997, 8) also indicated a sharply increased disparity since :i99oiillpet capital GDP between the eastern coastal provinces and western provIDces: In 1997, nearly all of the coastal provinces had a per capita GDP '~igherthan the national average. The per capita GDP of Shanghai, one of the !fiches(cities in China, was 4.5 times the average, while Guizhou, a poor if~giori,\Vas' only 37 percent of the national average (Wang 2000, 388). Carl 'lUskin, Zhao Renwei, and Li Shi comment, "Seldom has the world witnessed '~()shaq,and fast a rise in inequality as has occurred in China" (2001, 3). ~WithChina's accession into the World Trade Organization, greater social :?olariza~cin is expected. Huge social and political implications are expected :W the already stringent life of Chinese peasants will be further adversely ;affectedetinitely sure that with only my own alarm I could never have gotten up:yl1riling, Fang, Yue, Huahong, and Mei were my roommates. Yunling sleptabove me on the upper bunk; she was usually the last one to get up. She rilUtm1.lred in a sleepy voice: "Gosh! What kind oflife is this! Wake up at half pastsix.In winter I thought I'd never experience this kind of bitterness. Only mynll1m in the village would do it. She's great, getting up to feed us and the pigs!'We all laughed and told her it was better to act than talk. . After waking up, we rushed for the toilet; brushed our teeth, washed our Jaces{aIid changed our clothes. We had to take turns because there was only one toilet and one washroom. "Hurry up, hurry up"; there was shouting .everYWhere in the room, but none of the arguing that often occurred in other rooms, especially when someone lost their temper. In our room, the situati()n was still bearable because we had all learned to keep our patience withClheanother. Time was pressing and we could not afford to waste a m~~~e,so while someone was using the toilet, others would wash themselves in the washroom, while still others would change their overalls or corrib.their hair on the bed. Turns were arranged silently and we lived on .co~s~~trather than written orders. To make life easier, self~disciplining was nurtured from the moment we woke up. About 6:45 to 7:00 A.M. we began to leave the dormitory. We could t-eseo/efifteen minutes for breakfast if we could make it to the factory in less tharifwehty minutes. I often walked with Yunling and Mei, two Cantonese girlsfrOII1 rural Guangdong. Yunling complained of the harsh life in the workplace: "At home, I got up when the sun rose and it was time to be hwigryJor breakfast. But here,we are all forced to wakeup to the alarms:' I aske~her,· "Don't you need to help your mum cook or feed pigs in the m?Fi~g?" "Sometimes;' she replied, "but I was not the one supposed to do so:,Xunling had two elder sisters and one sister-in-law who helped the farriiIydo domestic chores and farm work. She was the free hand at home, whith>was why she was able to do factory work in Shenzhen. .. ·Rl1rallife rhythms were somewhat varied. Although speCific times for sowing, fertilizing, and harvesting were recorded in detail in the Chinese lilI1.a.fcalendar, there was still no strict disciplinary machine to guide everyday life. The work time and duties of individuals varied according to family

96

Made in China

economy, sibling order, and' gender. Pressures were felt, especially by the mother or eldest daughter who were required to manage the daily food for the whole family and often had to get up at a very early hour. But rarely did I hear anyone complain of not getting enough sleep in the village. Inthe workplace, however, the biological clock was completely socialized and reset to industrial time. Too little sleep was a serious problem; every day work~rs slept about six hours or less. Not enough sleep, plus a long and harsh working day, made the disciplinary time seem external and alien. The w{)rkc ing body was dragged along to meet the timetable imposed from the outside by the despot of disciplinary time. Yunling was the one who found it most difficult to cope with the work schedule. She therefore often emphasized that she could sleep as much as she liked when she was in her home village, but there seemed no way to escape once one was subject to industrial time. At 7:50 A.M. we had to queue up, enter the factory gate, and punchoi.Ir timecards. Security guards stood at the big gate carefully checking company permits, which had to be pinned to the chest pocket of one's overalls. Th()i;~ who forgot to bring the permit would not be allowed in, even if recognized as a company worker by the security guards. There was then no recoursebi.It to go back to the dormitory and find the permit, which would make one late for work and result in a fine and condemnation: five minutes late would'be counted as one hour late and wages would be deducted for two hours. The wage at Meteor was based largely on an hourly rate, around 3 renminbiper hour for production line workers. Such serious punishment reflected the saying that every minute oflabor was crucial to the functioning of the entire production machine. "Time is money" was the new disciplinary discourse prevailing in the rapidly developed industrialized areas. It was much highlighted in post~ socialist China with the rapid growth of global production and the atte1l1pts to articulate a global consciousness of speed and money. Work quickerand work harder was the secret to producing wealth and the primary ideology of global capitalism. Losing time was losing one's money along with the corn~. pany profit. Workers were thus self-technologized with this time/money sense that money was assigned to time and labor in their production pro,;, cess. It was felt not only that the disciplinary techniques would inducetheni) to work, but more fundamentally that money and wealth inspired themtq, . . .:.... work harder and longer. Because at Meteor as well as other workplaces In,~ Shenzhen the basic monthly wages for an eight-hour working day was a.HO~0 as 300 renminbi, overtime work at night and on holidays became' aself~;!i motivation project that could result in a doubling of wages. Time thefefoi~i ,~

Social Body, Discipline and Resistance

97

w~stobe deliberately planned and controlled, not only by the production ni~thine but also by the producers whose prime aim was to make money by selling their laboring bodies during their transient stay in the city. With our overalls, caps, and gloves in place and our work tools and materials prepared, the factory dock bell rang at exactly 8:00. The day would sbirtwith a ten-minute meeting reporting the output performance and commenting on each line's productivity and quality. After the workers returned to their positions, the light flashed, the line started running, and our morning work began. Music-popular Cantonese songs-was played for fifteeh minutes to freshen our minds to work more efficiently. It was said that the workers could work faster in the morning with their energy refreshedby a few hours of sleep, so discipline in the morning was often stricfand it was difficult to find a chance to talk or joke. There was a common understanding on the line that the higher management was in a mood to keep things straight in the morning hours. Talk and laughter caughtby the foreman or supervisor often was not tolerated. Silence, fastmoviIiglines, and the speed of time out of control-this was the feel of inotllirtg work. Five minutes before lunch at noon the line would stop and we started to finish up our jobs. Talk immediately mounted and all kinds of noises filled the silence. We had kept quiet for the whole morning, and it seemed that everYcme had to talk at once. We were not permitted to leave the shop floor at thesahle time. Each line took turns to leave because there was only one staircase for all of the shop floor workers. Rushing to eat lunch in fifteen miriut: we would then come back to our seats to take a nap. All of the lights were switched off and the bright workshop turned to a dark world. Because we were exhausted every day, all of us would fall asleep. The afternoon nap is ahabitiriChina, in both rural and urban areas. In the Mao era industrial enterprises would close at lunch and not reopen until 3:00 P.M., so that :~orld:!rsat least could have two hours of sleep after lunch. This habit has .been altered in urban China in the past decade, however, because the mode of economic life has been dictated by private capitalist practic~s rather than state ll1anagement. In the eyes of Meteor's management, it seems unbeliev~~Ie tijafworkers in China might have had such a leisurely life, one that ~bngKollgmanagers could not enjoy or even dream of. Indeed, the saying ~~t, "tiIll~ is money" was not a false consciousness tailored to cheat the ~6rkers:R~ther, the managers themselves as the bearers of the axiom had to ~~e up to it too. :/:Atii:SoP.M., the lights were turned on and we awoke to punch our time

es,

98

Made in China

cards. At 1:00 the dock bell rang, music was turned on, and the line .ran again. Work was repetitive and never-ending. The dosed environment; With all of the windows sealed and covered by a plastic curtain, kept the wor~erJ from being distracted by the outside world. We could not judge the time by seeing the rising and setting of the sun, nor could we breathe natural air. The. workplace air was regulated twenty-four hours a day by the centraFair conditioning. The temperature was kept at 68° F throughout the year, which was low enough not only to cool the electronic parts but also to wak~up drowsy eyes. Talking, gossiping, joking, and secret snacks were sometimes. allowed in the afternoon on the condition that they not affect the speed and running of the line. And it seemed that noise and laughter also served as an effective way to keep the workers awake. What the girls complained about most was not the low wage or harsh workload, but lack of adequate sleep sustained over months and years/An eighteen-year-old worker, Li Peng, told me, "Everyday I can only sleepfor five or six hours. It doesn't drive me mad, but makes me like a sleeping pig, Whenever there's a chance. I fall asleep. I can't help but be drowsy:' 'What the girls could do was making an effort to cheer themselves up. Every chance to have fun and share snacks was taken, each little moment was important to keeping up spirits. Another way of killing drowsiness was to take a short break by going to the washroom. But workers could not leave their work seats unless granted an out-of-position permit by the assistant line lea.der, and five minutes was the maximum allowed. Workers often complained about the time limit, especially when they were menstruating. Drowsiness was the contagious virus that the disciplinary machine found most difficult to deal with: work pace would slow down and the jobs piled upon the line, and some workers would slip and get hurt by the soldering gunor the molding machine. Small accidents such as hurting a finger ofteridccurred in late afternoon or at night, when workers did not have enough concentration. When somebody suffered more significant bodily paffia.nd was sent to the hospital, the others on the shop floor would suddenly wake up to their work. By 5:00 P.M. we could all hear our stomachs rumbling and we were hungry for dffiner. Work started again at 6:00 P.M. and the time card¥(as punched again. We were then told what time we could end our work that night. If it was at 9:00 we thought we had a lucky day. Normally we stopped work at 10:00, and sometimes the shift extended to 11:00 or 12:00 for a rush production order. Night work was comparatively more relaxed, andYan spent more than two years in Dongguan, working as a secretary in an electronics company where she earned 600 yuan each month., She felt happy m the first year because she was supported by her sister's family; she ate and slept at their home, enjoying the sort of family life that was beyond the drea.ms of the typical dagongmei working far from her hometown. As a seCretary, reporting directly to the general manager of the company, she held a high-status job. She could learn a lot, especially about how to deal with cOInplicated personnel matters, and in this job she matured. ··But then came her affair with her boss, the general manager, a Hong Kong man in his mid-forties. Ultimately the affair forced her to leave the

the

180

Made in China

company and even Dongguan. Yan told me the story one night when we.had gone to a bookshop: He treated me so nicely, like an uncle, teaching me a lot of things. Ididri't hate him, frankly. We worked as a pair of good partners, and he never scolded or criticized me .... But he had a family-a wife, sons, anddaugh; ters in Hong Kong. Sometimes they came to visit him and had ag66~ time.... He wanted to take me as a lover and promised to get IIl.e>a~ apartment and take care of me if! was willing to stay with him. You k11?~~~ lot of girls these days are looking for this kind of relationship, waiting fora man to feed them. They don't mind the low status. But I was so hesita.nt, very fearful that something out of my control would happen. Itrriig~t affect my whole life. Yan refused the relationship and left the company. Asked if she regret:tediit, she responded with a smile and said, "Sometimes I do miss him." It see~~~ clear that they were sexually attracted to each other, and that the reason for her refusal involved more than an ethical issue. She was ambivalent eridugh that even she herself could not quite tell what she felt. Within Shenzhen there are certain residential areas-called er-naic.~~, concubine villages or second-wife villages-where women live who are supported by Hong Kong businessmen. To be an er-nai was to be an illegal Wife, a woman whose immorality lay in her reluctance to work for herself artdhef greed in enjoying what was perceived as a luxurious life at the expense/iJf another woman's family. When I visited these areas accompanied by Other women workers from Meteor, they often made fun of the women theysaW, singling out their make-up and the way they dressed. "Bu yao miail#i" (shameless) or "mai shen" (selling one's body) were common phrasesulie~ to make fun of these women. Mian zi indicated not only one's dignityb*t also one's relationship with others, especially one's family and the c0rn.~~­ nity. Thus bu yao mian zi not only insulted its target but also involve~~ wider network of filial and communal relations. Mai shen was a kind·of exchange of one's body for a better life, also with overtones of material pursuit. Yan often kept silent when other women gossiped about the women they saw in the street. Sometimes she would comment, "It's their business,ddh~t stick your nose in ie' In her case, it had not been money that had attra.c~ed her to the man. But her decision to leave him was not without consideration of mian zi. The presence of her elder sister, the fact that her parentsWer~ government cadres, and her relatively high educational background alleOn'-

Scream, Dream, and Transgression

lB1

tributed to her anxiety and thus the repression of her desires. "1 am poor, hut I am not greedy": Yan never forgot to convey this message to me. While relative poverty had led her to leave her hometown and look for a better life elsewhere, it did not impel her to love a Hong Kong man as her superior. She did not consider her love illegal or immoral, but both mian zi and the uncertainty of a future with a married man caused her to give up the relationship. In other words, the repression ofYan's sexual desire was both personal and cultural. The cultural value placed on monogamy, particularly for women, was reinforced by discrimination against the mostly poor women who entered such arrangements. This discrimination was particularly severe when the men were from the upper classes, and there was thus a huge gap between the two parties. In leaving Dongguan, however, Yan was caught in an impasse: "1 was wondering whether to go home or find a job somewhere else. I really had rio idea at the beginning. I missed my hometown so much and definitely wanted to return. But I found I had no choice. My hukou had been moved oht (of the village) and I no longer could find a job in my hometown government. I found myself with nowhere to settle. I could not return to my hometown in this position." At that particular moment Yan realized that once her life was put in transition, she could never go back. Her life was out of her control forever. She often told me she was just floating here and there. The paradox was that although she had suppressed her desire to love a man precisely in order to prevent the loss of control over her future, she now f()und her life in this state. This sudden, surprising realization, I believed, yras the probable cause of her trauma. Yan realized something that she could not accept, and the process of realization involved both pain and refusal. Yan herself saw the dream and scream as an uncontrollable evil force that was born from within her body. It had nothing to do, however, with such spirits or ghosts as are often said to haunt women workers in Southeast Asian countries (Ong 1987). Yan herself thought that she suffered from xinbing, the illness of the heart. Although she always emphasized that she could not understand the reason for this, she often said: "There must be somethillg wrong inside myself.... 1 am sick, you know, that is why I have the dream and scream:' For her the dream and scream was a sign of her sickness. Thus; although inner and psychological, her "heartsickness" took a form that was not separable from either the body or the social. Dream and scream was an index of bodily imbalance and cosmic disorder. The evil, as she uI1derstood it, was an external force that came to dominate her, but it had grown from her own body and mind.

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In Yan's story there is a dynamic relationship between the individualand the social. The social might be "out there" but it cannot affect an indi~idual's life unless the individual turned it inside out. The rapid socialthanges affecting her might be beyond Yan's control, yet such dislocations col.lldonly destroy her sense of self at the particular moment she realized and sirrtiiltaneously refused this fact. But there was never truly a dichotomy between the individual and the social; the individual was always in the process, to a varying extent, of realizing the social. In this sense, we can understan~ that the individual is impersonal. But what is more important is to dec()dethe process of impersonalization and to show that the social never ceasesto impose its violence on the self-and the self, with its existence as being in the world, could not but realize the social existence that is not real.

Yan's Displaced Self

After she left Dongguan, Yan was helped by a relative and found thejob in Shenzhen at the Meteor plant where we met and worked together.YefYan was far from happy with the job. As an ordinary clerk in one of the departments in the company, she enjoyed none of the status or the privileges she had had in Dongguan. Above her was a huge hierarchy. She knewshe had little chance of promotion without particular guanxi-nepotistic relationships or kin in the upper echelons. Like all the other workers at Meteo:r,she put in twelve hours a day plus overtime. In Dongguan, she hadustJally worked ten hours and had some leisure time of her own at night. In.Shen~ zhen, too, witl?-out the support fromher sister's family, she had to eafmthe factory and sleep in the dormitory; she had to depend on herself. One day, when several workers were complaining about wages,Yan tolYan was on an odyssey of human freedom and praxis, opening up a minor genre of resistance.

7 APPROACHING A MINOR GENRE OF RESISTANCE

bna: burning-hot day in mid-July 2001, in a mountainous village in Meizholl,a relatively poor region in north Guangdong, I did not expect to meet a:family of five migrants from Sichuan. They had been settled in the village for eight years, renting a room from local villagers. There they had given hirthto their youngest daughter and sent their children to the local school. ulia,ha, you are surprised? We Sichuan people are already everywhere, in ¢very' corner of the whole country. We work in a brick-making plant. Look, thec:ompound is just over the river-you can still see the smoke coming out from the duct. It's arduous and dirty work; the locals are not willing to do it;' sa.idthe father, a man in his mid-thirties, who was feeding his child. The ~other was busy preparing a meal. She helped "meet both ends of the 1l1onth" by tilling farming land rented from a local household, whose own lllel11bers had gone dagong in a coastal city. A young man, the youngest brother to the father, had just returned on his bicycle from the brick-making plailt;and he joined our conversation: "I have no skill. I couldn't find a job ill,thedty. Those foreign-invested companies want girls only. You can hardly sUgirls in this village. They've all gone:' When I met this Sichuan migrant family in Guangdong, more than five years had passed since my fieldwork in the Meteor plant in Shenzhen. The ChInese rural migrants were not only everywhere becoming "floating populations" but had also settled in places far from their native villages, to which

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their status, identity, rights, and means of survival were ascribed. The migration flows or mingong (peasant-worker) tides in China reached their peak in the mid-1990s and have ebbed since then, evolving into a more multicolored pattern, a vivid metaphor for Chinese society at large on the move. A part of this is a silent yet inexorable "social revolution;' which foretells a great desire, the desire that gratifies, yearns, urges, and finally releases the energy of social transformation, working against the repressive socialist force in its quest for modernity. A new age of Chinese soc~ety has come. It has no choice but to disrupt, if not pervert, existing social relations, creating new modalities of political engineering and social resistance between state and socil!ty.. In using the term social revolution I mean a sort of social force springing up from the very bottom of society-the Chinese peasantry, who constituted the subaltern of Chinese socialist history and who strove for rapid sodal change. In contrast to the Communist revolution, or the economic reforrns that followed it that were launched from above, the explosive social force·of this silent revolution came from below, spearheaded by a Chinesehual population that had been tied to agriculture for over three decades. Guangdong villages were becoming increasingly empty at the end of the century, leaving aging people and children in the villages and the agricultural worklri the hands of Sichuan peasants who had left their own land, searchingJor survival or dreaming of getting rich, either in the coastal industrial cities in remote villages in Guangdong. New and more complex patterns Within the "floating population" in the late 1990S heralded a deeper reconfigtiration of social relations and social class, the nature of which still has notbeen adequately studied. If we say it was the socialist party-state actingasa "visible hand" to pin down the Chinese peasantry ever since the 195 os; then it was the failure of the visible hand that set the peasantry on the move in the 1990S. Far from resulting in the demise of the state, the party-state has become increasingly stronger since incorporating a market discourse to legitimiiejts political power, change its political technologies, and enlarge its b~f~au­ cracy. The market, nevertheless, was a new actor on the stage, occupying a hegemonic role in constructing new imaginaries, new identities, and new desires for the new age. The silent social revolution, if we agree that ifexists, has a tougher war to fight. Its enemy is not yet clear. In this book I strive, first of all, to make sense of this silent social.revolution as it emerged at the end of the 1990S, and to identify its enemy (the matrix of power and discourse), which continues to reconfigure itselfas I write. I understand this social revolution as a countermovement against two:

or

A Minor Genre of Resistance

191

reactionary forces: the changing modes of political regulation over society, and the increasing marketization of socialist society, embroidered with a hegemonic eulogy: "the quest for globality." Although I retain the word revolution, I do not do so with the intent to romanticize this new social force or to indicate that any mature social agenda against state and capital has been formed. Instead, I understand this great social force, at the very core of .. its ambiguities and (im)possibiIities, not only as a fundamental challenge to >existing social relations-the dual structure of urban and rural society and increasing social inequality (Study Group 2000)-but also as a great generator of new subjects, new dreams, and new desires that conjure up the very possibility of social transformation. In the postsocialist period, both the dominated and the dominating .forces are rapidly making and remaking themselves, searching for their own cultural identity, social status, market position, and even political legitimacy. The project of theorizing these complex processes is beyond the scope of this book; however, here I limit my attempt to understand the social revolutionits agents and actions, its subjectivities and transgressions-to the ethnography of female migrant factory workers, the making of the new workersubject, and the dreams and desires of peasant bodies becoming "modern 'Workers." It is the making of this worker-subject as an unfinished project that launches a journey of exploration into Chinese society.

AMinor Genre of Resistance

lstarted my long journey to search for a Chinese worker-subject within the trajectory of China's state socialist system's incorporation into global capitalism. I ended up with the seemingly inevitable social violence inflicted on the individual lives of dagongmei, migrant working daughters. I am aware that this journey may lead to the enclosure, if not foreclosure, of agency, subjectivity, and social change. But only by meeting that danger can it pr()perly open up the possibilities of a minor genre of resistance in conteml'()rary China. In fact, these incidents of social violence like Yan's dream and scream are glaring examples of an epochal trauma, and thus the social resistance that enmeshes the lives of dagongmei in this time of rapidly changing Chinese society. Reform-era China is envisioned through a lens focused squarely on the global market, a lens that not only occludes new forms of class and gender inequality-and thus legitimizes them as necessary evik-but also leaves the voices of individual transgression subsumed within the collective project. Who cares? A giant China is coming and a few million

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sacrifices mean little. After all, it was the West that was the first to dreaniOf and promise the coming of a giant China in the twenty-first centurY;'fhi* vision then triggered a mighty desiring machine in mainland Chin~ii~~ effects felt especially among the middle-class elite and those newly transc formed capitalists who are misplaced in a system without the proper natJl~ of capitalism: "capitalists without capitalism."l The fire in the foreign-invested toy plant, the story of which opens thiS book, occurred two years before I started my ethnographic study initn~ Meteor workplace. The blaze took the lives of over eighty workers~n% caused the collapse of the factory building, and yet it never destroyed~M7 dreams and hopes of thousands and thousands of dagongmei whocon~ tinued to flood into the economic development zones. I feel particularlY'ar~ loss at this moment, as I arrive near the end of this project. Those of wh0ril.J write and am concerned about probably will 'never have the time or the opportunity to read what I write, especially in this form and style of writing. So why keep on with it? Again, perhaps it is the urge, the pain, the imp()s~ sibility of not writing that drives me to the stories. 2 But most likely it'1~1 take another journey to unravel the violence of the writing, the specific power matrix in which meaning, language, academic institution, andself~ colonization all contribute to this connivance-the violence of translitera~ tion of the life of Chinese dagongmei. In the final phase of my fieldwork at the Meteor plant I met Yan.,th~ migrant working daughter who struggled through the journey of dreatJl~ and screams, disrupting if not threatening the disciplinary order inW~. workplace. As ~ disclosure of social violence, I dream of a politics ofwritiI18 that could work to turn the pain inside out and go deeper into the technology of power that held these individual workers' lives; and if the worker-subjec{is the subject of human praxis, I dream of a poetics of writing that might help articulate an odyssey of social transgression and human freedom. I also never expected to meet Xiaoming, the fire survivor I described#t the beginning of this book, and Yan, whose story is narrated toward theeiid: Fire, pain, dream, and scream tied three lives together-bound us with:!~ mutual imperative to find a way out. My sensitivity, if any, to the charige~in Chinese society was first of all brought out by meeting Xiaoming in 199J~~~ the pain that maintained a ghostly hold on me. It was through Xiaoming's trauma, and then Yan's screams, that I finally realized that there wasn~ individual story that was not political and social. It was in the encounterBf the traumas in the field and the attempt to understand and narrate the lives

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193

and struggles of Chinese dagongmei that I was driven to anchor the practice 6f a minor genre of resistance. By bringing the insights of a minor genre of resistance into the scene of contemporary China, we can see that Yan's scream and Xiaoming's pain, experiences of not only minority but subalternity and collectivity, are not merely oppositional to a master language but are further resistant to all language itself. Their screams and pains are fundamentally political, the subversive power of which is derived from its persistent refusal to be channeled into the signifying chain. It shrieked, destroying the symbolic order of this alienated and increasingly polarized world. A minor genre of resistance focuses on personal accounts, and its magical power lies not in generalizing individual narratives into a collective enunciation but rather in directly displaying that there is no individual story that is not also a historical narrative. Yan's scream is a cry against an epoch in which all of the Chinese working daughters are forced to live out their common existence.

l\IIultisited . . Resistance

The opening of China to global capital and the introduction of market mechanisms undoubtedly inflicted more serious wounds on Chinese society and individuals than we can imagine. Notwithstanding a specific process of proletarianization in China, the persistent influx of peasant migrants into the urban areas did not give birth to a new Chinese working class in the past tWo decades. The making of the class force is, after all, retarded, shattered, a.nd destroyed not only by the market apparatus but by the state machine. pagongmei, as half peasants and half proletariat, are the displaced subjects produced by the hybrid conjugation of state and market machines. . . . Xiaoming's escape from the gates of hell drove the pain of writing and my urge to disclose these double wounds. Later in my fieldwork I was confronted with the delicate microphysics of power in the workplace. The production machine, plugged into the state and market machines, is the immediate means for manufacturing massive numbers of displaced selves. The human body, the producing body, is the interface or the threshold where violent forces, whether political or economic, complicit or conflicting, do their work. .But the state and market ai:e not the only springs of power: local cultural practice-in China the patriarchal culture, although changing and reconfiguring-comes onto the scene as well. The process of gendering, the reg-

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Made in China

ulation of sex and sexuality, and the dominance of marriage and familylife showed the great strength of power in sexualizing the dagong subjects. The rural family still provided the primary support and sources of identityto the migrant women workers who, otherwise, would be left alone to face the i~: peratives of capital. Where the tragedy lies is that in the passage tobeihg modern dagongmei, the women workers would soon discover that f~tt6ry work was no panacea to their displaced lives. Industrial labor was, rather, new alienation to the married life that was still a common practice of Chh nese rural women; some of the single women even dreamed ofg~ttitig married as a way to escape from factory work, continuing to serve the Chinese patriarchal family on their return from the urban factory. Triple oppressions are my exegesis of the fate of Chinese dagongmei, despite the risk of overgeneralization and simplification. Yet, in the face of the inescapable oppressions, a new Chinese worker-subject is struggling to emerge despite all its very (im)possibilities: Yan's scream was the scream of our epoch, decrying the violence and absurdity of the triple oppressions. The body in pain is bereft of sources of speech, unfolding the natur~of subalternality to its very extremeness. While Xiaoming spoke outthr~i.lgh the process of othering in a calm and emotionless voice, Yan scream~dol.l.t into nothingness, attempting to ease the pain and to reunite the split body and self. Both struggle to resist a possible disintegration of the self; they uphold the worker-subject of freedom, freedom of projecting themseivesjn the world with human dignity, and freedom to act against the social violence inflicted on them. As Alain Touraine succinctly states, the subject is "a call to transform the Self into an actor" (1985, 260). The painful selves are never the defeated bodies. but the transgressive subjects. The displaced subjedsJike Yan and Xiaoming turn out to be actors of praxis. New theorizing on resistance, not simply of the worker-subject; is urgently required, and it should go beyond conventional dichotomies ()findi~ vidual and collective actions, personal and social resistance, and nonpOlitical and political confronting behavior. A multisited resistance is perhapspossIC ble. The coincidental encounters with Xiaoming and Yan brought me to a concern for the social, or more specifically, to the intriguing relationships between sodal violence and individual lives. The trauma opened me u.p and I realized the rapid changes in Chinese society, the reactionary forte of market and state on individuals, and the multiple arenas of reactions and transgressions of the subject that criss-cross and surpass the boundaries of conventional understandings of resistance. A complex interdependeIlctof

a

A Minor Genre of Resistance

195

domination and resistance has been constituted, and as Jean Comaroff argues, "this system was a hierarchical, coordinated cluster of relations, in which the exercise of centralized power ... impose their domination on the more diffuse domains of production, exchange, sexuality, and nurture" (1985,260). This diffuse microphysics of power, in return, engenders a realpolitik of resistance rooted in everyday practice in all layers and, as subtle and various as it is, denies simple dichotomization in terms of resistance and compliance (261-62). A disjuncture of resistance patterns occurs, breaking through the traditional binary opposition of individual actions (which have often been trivialized and taken not as a force of resistance to social change) and collective actions (which were often highly romanticized as the only true force to challenge the established order) (Scott 1990). Dream, scream, fainting, menstrual pain, inner splitting of self, workplace defiance, slowdowns, fighting, running away, and even petition and strike are all points and lines ofresistant behaviors, forming a cartography of resistance that will inevitablydirect a challenge to power and control. A minor and multisited journey of resistance aims at deterritorializing thereified spaces of control and resistance and opening up a multiple front ofresistances, a new poetics of transgression, that always advances into a different war of positions. It will call up a multicellular site of social actiems, a motley collection of transgressed events that eventually substantiate whole tactics of resistance countering against the whole technology of power. It is, in James Scott's (1990, 4-5) term, the valorization of "hidden trimscripts" or "infrapolitics" that every subordinate group can create, not 6nly to act behind the backs of the dominant but also to openly confront arid disrupt their power. As Scott succinctly puts it: ''An individual who is affronted may develop a personal fantasy of revenge and confrontation, but when the insult is but a variant of affronts suffered systematically by a whole race, class, or strata, then the fantasy can become a collective cultural product. Whatever form it assumes-offstage parody, dreams of violent revenge, rnillennial versions of a world turned upside down-this collective hidden transcript is essential to any dynamic view of power relations" (28). The formation of the Chinese dagongmeilzai, as half peasant and half worker, does not reproduce the structures and relations of the working class in its traditional sense. Instead, this new worker-subject invites a poetics of transgression that should be more creative, multifronted, and penetrable to the power matrix of capital, state, and the effects of sociocultural discourses in this increasingly globalized world. This new politics of transgression, of

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course, can never be simplified into individual or collective actions;fiohpolitical or political engagements, local or global struggles, and the like. Throughout this book I see my factory coworkers, friends, and thepe()'ple I met as pioneers who teased out the tensions in all the structural arid historical forces they faced. I also struggle to see them as human subJ~tts, as practical agents who consciously and/or unconsciously live out their body politics and negotiate with and confront those tensions and forces;F~tthe Chinese dagongmei, caught in the impasse of triple oppressions,theY4id live out the class experience and interpellete their class position aspartof their life struggles. Yet class differences are not the only conflict in their working lives, in part because of the hallucinating effects of the hegemonic power but, more important; because of their own subjective experiences living within a microphysics of domination and power far more complicated than class relations can contain. Rural-urban disparity, policingoft~e state, gender difference, family and kinship, and production relationsas)lidl as consumerism all contribute to a matrix of domination relations that could hardly be reduced to a single dominant oppositional logic. The acute terrain of contestation was the concomitant as well conflictual relations between the patriarchal family and the global production machine irit~eat­ ing ambivalent experiences for the women workers. If we see that individualism is the evil product of Western neoliberal capitalism, and collectivism is the peril of Chinese socialism, then wel1a.ve no choice but to look for a resistance agenda that can transgressalldrearticulate both individuality and communality without privileging the former, which serves the logic of capital, and the latter, which would easilyfall prey to a political strategy put forward in its name. A worker-subject seeks a space in its own right, surpassing any ideologized resistance projects that often lead to the subsumption of workers' subjectivity within the rIl()ve" ment. A worker-subject project should therefore open up a new cartography of transgressions, taking a multiple front, criss-crossing individual and>c'(jllective levels, and negotiating not only with economic and political factors but also cultural and psychic experiences.

\

NOTES

Introduction The first factory fire to occur in a foreign-invested industrial area of China was in May 1990 in Dongguan, a highly industrialized zone of the Pearl River Delta. This ·fire caused the death of over eighty workers in a Hong Kong capital-owned factory, which produced raincoats for export to Western markets. My first encounter with Chinese migrant workers was due to this blaze when I paid a visit to the injured workers in a hospital in Guangzhou. Later I made another visit to the hospital with my good friend Chan Yu, with whom I conducted a joint field study . in four villages in Rubei in July 1990 to trace and record the home villages of the · injured workers of the factory. 2. Note that pseudonyms have been used for the names of all factory personnel throughout this volume. The quote from Xiaoming here, as well as all other quotes from factory workers and management staff members, were taken from the notes I compiled during my fieldwork in China in 1990, 1993, and 1995-1996. All translations in the text are · mine unless otherwise indicated. 3 For a vivid description and analysis of the hukou system in constraining the different life chances and rights of the Chinese urban and rural populations, see

·1

4

Solinger 1999. For a discussion of the changing forms of family in post-Mao China, see Davis

and Harrell 1993. ·5 Many married women in the rural areas did struggle with going out as dagongmei

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Notes to Chapter One

in the urban industrial zones. An increasing trend, since the late 1990S, of rl1~r~i~d women working in the foreign-invested factories has been noted, but systerilatic research on this area is still lacking. 6 Emily Honig (1986), Gail Hershatter (1986), and Elizabeth Perry (1993) have alI made excellent contributions by arguing that the tongxiang relationship.:w~s central to the making of the politics of Chinese labor in the early twentietl,t century. 7 See also the reporting by Hung Xiangfa (1994) in her "Taohun de dagollgmei" (The working girl who escaped marriage). 8 As Elizabeth Perry rightly puts it: "Labor politics begins with the laborerstl,te c

rn

selves: their geographical origins, gender, popular culture, education attainment~, work experiences, and the like" (1993, 4-5). 9 By articulating the concept of "social actor;' Alain Touraine tries to decentralize the idea of a class subject that might too easily be incorporated intoistate or totalitarian project. A social actor, he argues, is not someone Whoseal:tion is structurally determined by the economic position he (or she) occupies' but "someone who modifies the material and, above all, social environment in whici1 he finds himself by transforming the division of labour, modes of decisioll;-. making, relations of domination or cultural orientations" (1995, 207). Asod~ actor is a subject struggling to be free from individualism and collectivism and ready to take action for the sake of social transformation. in open-ended forl11Sof social resistance.

State Meets Capital: The Making and Unmaking of a New Chinese Working Class

1.

Although I. do .not intend here to neglect the complexities and variations new working classes emergent in different regions of China, migrant w0rke~s throughout the nation nevertheless share many of the same characteristiCs~ot only in terms of "mode of production" but also "mode of life?' This ethnographic: study, which is focused on migrant workers in south China, can only shed light 6n: one particular form of working class emerging in the changing society of Shen:~. zhen. However, this form of working class is becoming increasingly importarit'iIl contemporary (and future) China as a whole. 2 See a critical review on the problematic of class analysis in Kalb 1997. 3 See Walder (1984), "The Remaking of the Chinese Working Class, 1949-1981,"JOt the argument of the (un}making of the Chinese working class in socialist China. 4 On the controversy between the role of the peasantry and the working class asthe leadership of revolution, see Schram 1969. 5 In the 1990S Shenzhen rearranged itself into four administrative zones; thenew one was named Yantian. 1

Notes to Chapter Two

199

6 In 1990 the total number of workers and staff was over 550,000, of whom over 290,000 were temporary workers. At the end of 1995 the number of temporary workers was over 200 percent of the regular workers and five times that of the contract workers (Shenzhen Statistical Yearbook 1996). 7 For discussion of the use of temporary labor in the Maoist period, see Walder 1986 (48-54)·

.. 8 However, a careful reading ofthe statistics can provide some clues. According to the Shenzhen Statistical Yearbook for 1992 and 1996, female labor, not exclusively temporary labor, in the light industry sectors made up 62.8 percent of the total .workforce in 1991, while in 1994 female labor in the manufacturing sector as a .. whole accounted for 60.2 percent. In 1995 total female labor already amounted to 417,123 in Shenzhen. Because the statistics mix regular, contract, and temporary labor we cannot know the exact percentage of temporary female laborers working .in the manufacturing sectors. ·